Tarn's anthropological eco-poetics

Back in 2011, for episode #42 of the PoemTalk series, we took on the eighth section of Nathaniel Tarn’s sequence Dying Trees, which is titled “Unravelling / Shock.” Dying Trees was first published as a chapbook in 2003; later, in 2008, it was included entirely in Tarn’s New Directions book, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers. When the Dying Trees sequence was still unpublished, Tarn gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House (2002) during which he read several sections of the then-new poem, including the one discussed here by Marcella Durand, Burt Kimmelman, Erin Gautsche, and PoemTalk’s producer and host, Al Filreis. Here's the audio recording of the program: MP3. And here’s much more about the episode and about Tarn’s unique anthropological eco-poetics. Tarn’s critical writing has been collected in Views from the Weaving Mountain: Selected Essays in Poetics and Anthropology (1991) and The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations on Poetics and Anthropology (2007). “The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted,” Tarn has writteen, “are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wildnerness?”